SWWIM Bubbles Up
We're back with a new season!
Tidal Changes
The SWWIM Team hopes you had a fantastic summer and are ready to dive back into our seventh season of poetry.
SWWIM Every Day will resume tomorrow, on September 1st, with one new poem published daily Monday through Friday. Subscribe below to receive emails of daily publications. (Please note that SWWIM Every Day is and always will be free to read—just click on the purple button and mark the “no pledge” option. But if you want to pledge a paid subscription now or in the future, we will happily consider it a donation. Or you can donate here.)
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SWWIM’s Fall Reading Series returns Wednesday, September 6th, featuring poets Felicia Zamora and Lolita Stewart-White. Go to swwim.org to see the full Fall Reading Series schedule and artist lineups. The readings take place at The Betsy Hotel in Miami and will also be live-streamed on our Instagram and Facebook.
Submissions
General Guidelines: SWWIM’s mission through our publications, readings, and residencies is to celebrate the art and contributions made by women. This includes all women: cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, female-presenting, intersex, and all other forms of gender expression. We welcome submissions of 1-3 poems for publication on SWWIM Every Day year-round through regular, expedited, and feedback portals on Submittable.
Results from the 2023 residency application cycle will be announced in November 2023.
Save the date: The next round of applications will be open from May 15-July 15, 2024.
“Too brief again, this August light…” —Ann-Margaret Lim
As many SWWIMmers have already heard via social media, this past year has been a difficult and emotional journey. Our co-founder and editor-in-chief, Catherine Esposito Prescott, suffered the devastating loss of her 18-year-old son, Austen Clyde Prescott. Austen passed away on August 3, 2023, after bravely battling DIPG, a rare and aggressive pediatric brain cancer, since the previous summer. He is deeply missed by Catherine, his father Andy, his siblings Connor and Celia, his extended family, his extensive group of friends, and indeed all who knew him. The editors and staff at SWWIM mourn this loss along with Catherine, and we encourage you, if you’re able, to donate in his name towards the research of DIPG. Together, we can work to find a cure: https://canefunder.miami.edu/campaigns/fy24-team-620.
“I know my body doesn’t end here, the faint light of me flying…” —Maureen Seaton
SWWIM also mourns the loss of poet and guardian angel Maureen Seaton (10/20/1947-08/26/2023), who passed away at the age of 75. A community-driven poet and professor who taught at the University of Miami for years, Maureen was many things to many people: a collaborator, a mentor, a wise and wonderful friend. To us, she was a generous benefactor. When we asked her to give us a previously unpublished poem to help launch SWWIM Every Day, she went one better: she wrote one for us. “Among Us, Divine” was the sixth poem we ever published. It remains one of our favorites. Emily Blank, one of Maureen’s daughters, suggested that if you can, you make donations in her name to her favorite causes, which we’re honored to say include SWWIM as well as O, Miami and Lambda Literary Foundation. Maureen, we will always love and miss you.
We share our losses and sadness in the spirit of transparency, as well as this: The SWWIM Team isn’t going anywhere. In fact, in addition to bringing on Miami-born, Cuban-American poet and writer Emma Trelles just before our summer hiatus, we’ve added two more award-winning Contributing Editors-at-Large: Mia Leonin, a Cuban-American poet, writer, and professor at the University of Miami, and Christell Victoria Roach, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University who is a descendant of Miami’s first Black Pioneers. You can learn more about all three of them here, as well as all our decorated editors and readers.
We look forward to sharing our eighth season of readings and writers-in-residence and our seventh season of publishing with all of you, our devoted and loyal listeners and readers. We can’t thank you enough for being here.
XO
SWWIM Team
Welcome back! I hope you are all safe after the storm!